Inside the Star

Alicia Keys shines through high-concept nonsense at ACC

At the Air Canada Centre on Tuesday night, Alicia Keys had to cater to the expectations that nowadays come with headlining an arena-sized, contemporary commercial-R&B show while being three times the performer typically thrust onstage for one of these things.

It’s very easy to admire Alicia Keys for the talent she is while wishing she’d step out of her comfort zone.

When she steps out of her comfort zone in a manner altogether unbecoming her talents, however, you’re slapped in the face with the realization that, ah, maybe Alicia Keys is best just left as she is.

What Keys does is firmly serviceable, Grammy Awards-approved, middle-of-the-road American R&B that tries just a tidge harder than most of its mainstream ilk but stubbornly refuses to elevate itself above an unflappable level of smoooove that always leaves you wishing she’d aim the bar a little higher. And you know what? If that’s what you’re looking for going in, let it lie. It’s fine. She’s fine. The lady has class, poise and smooooveness nailed down.

At the Air Canada Centre on Tuesday night, though, Keys and her “Set the World on Fire” tour also had to cater to the expectations that nowadays come with headlining an arena-sized, contemporary commercial-R&B show while being three times the performer typically thrust onstage for one of these things.

And that, frankly, made for a rather ill fit between Alicia Keys, piano-stroking soul balladress, and Alicia Keys, pop idol forced into awkwardly ringleading a bunch of distracting dance-troupe numbers while keyboards popped willy-nilly from various trapdoors set in the stage, animated LED moons rose and set on the big screens behind her, and “A Woman’s Worth” was bafflingly recast as the soundtrack for a spy-movie send-up that never actually happened. Nor made any sense at all.

In any case, I’m guessing whatever boggled high-concept nonsense that at one point had Keys’s dancers firing imaginary tommy guns into the overwhelmingly female (or grudgingly coupled) ACC crowd to the James Bond theme would have been better served simply treating man candy as man candy and, for instance, getting that hot dude rubbin’ all over Alicia during “Unthinkable (I’m Ready)” to take his shirt off and be done with it. The place would’ve gone up in flames.

Regardless, Keys doesn’t need extraneous bells and whistles and lithe male forms and whooshing vid-screen “Empire State of Mind” flybys to get by. The end result of Tuesday’s ACC gig was that you wished you could simply witness the Hell’s Kitchen-bred diva – and recently minted Blackberry “global creative director” – singing “Tears Always Win,” “You Don’t Know My Name,” “Fallin’” or the magnificent new “Brand New Me” whilst sitting behind a piano and accompanied by the relatively modest band (four musicians, three backup singers) she brought with her on the night in a dimly lit cocktail parlour with red velvet and caricatures of Whitney Houston, Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin on the walls. Or Massey Hall. Somewhere, anyway, where there wasn’t sufficient space for someone to insist that four Zorro-lookin’ dancers immediately intrude upon the stage during “Karma” and then periodically return to lead Alicia Keys away from the keyboards and the microphones where she’s perfectly at home and perfectly in control to pace through choreography that makes very little contextual sense. (Somewhere, too, where the piercingly nasal and obvious chorus to “Girl on Fire” wouldn’t find communal resonance as an arena anthem, but that’s an argument for another day.)

Leave the unicorns to Lady Gaga. That’s not what Alicia Keys is about. She filled the Air Canada Centre very close to capacity on Tuesday night on the strength of her pipes, some universally appealing songwriting, an unshowy breed of class and not a single costume change. That’s enough. Leave it be. Don’t mess with it.

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